Wednesday

May 28, 2008 at 12:01 AMMay 28, 2008 at 9:55 PM

New executive director of Defense Technology Initiative hits the ground running, puts Bedford base in the running for major command headquarters.

Retired Brig. Gen. Donald Quenneville has only been executive director of the Waltham-based Defense Technology Initiative since January, and he’s already talking about luring a major Air Force Command group to the region.

The Plymouth resident, who retired last summer after 36 years in the Air Force, signed up for the job of promoting the defense technology industry and protecting military bases at a time when DTI was beginning to develop a more regional focus.

Formerly known as MassDTI, the organization now under Quenneville’s command – funded by dues paid by the region’s defense-related businesses – was founded in 2003 to protect Massachusetts military bases from closure during the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure proceedings.

Now, Quenneville, 60, is focusing his efforts on bringing the headquarters for a newly forming cyberspace command to either Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford or the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire.

But despite its more regional outlook, DTI is still looking out for Massachusetts bases – including the Otis Air National Guard base on Cape Cod, which narrowly survived the last round of closures.

Why did DTI decide to expand to a more regional focus?

There are no borders when it comes to economic development and jobs. I mean, there might be a different tax structure if you go to New Hampshire or Rhode Island, but in terms of generating jobs – if something is here like Hanscom Air Force Base, they don’t worry about whether a person drives from New Hampshire in the morning, or Rhode Island, or Massachusetts. So we realized the importance of a regional construct and hence the evolution of the Defense Technology Initiative into a regional perspective.

Why are you pursuing the Air Force’s Cyber Command?

The Air Force recognized some time back that many of their decision makers rely totally on the ability to get information from Point A to Point B ... And they need to ensure that they have uninterrupted accessibility to cyberspace. So they started bringing everything together in one location under the 8th Air Force in Louisiana, and then they recognized that this is large enough and it’s important enough to the way we do business that we better have a major command ... So they decided to stand up this command (separately) called “cyberspace command.”

How did Hanscom Air Force Base get mentioned as a possible headquarters?

I’d met Maj. Gen. Bill Lord (the provisional cyberspace commander) while on active duty, and he was a guest speaker at a conference that was held in Newton back in January. So literally the second week I was (with DTI) I went to that and I talked to Bill and asked him whether it was too late for Massachusetts to throw our hat in the ring for the command headquarters, and he said, “No, but in a month from now it’ll be too late.”

What kind of opportunities would the new command center bring to the state?

Well, first of all there are 540 jobs associated with the headquarters. Does that mean that all of them are going to come to one location? We don’t know that. The Secretary of the Air Force has, on many occasions, talked about the fact that this could be a distributed command – in many locations – that they could operate virtually. And so it’s sort of the Air Force’s choice as far as how many of those headquarters positions they’d actually want to put here. But the real impact to this area wouldn’t be necessarily the 500 or so jobs, but in fact the additional economic development by way of companies that are seeking to do work for the (division).

How did Otis Air National Guard Base survive through the most recent BRAC process?

What they did was they re-rolled the folks there, so rather than closing it altogether, they re-rolled the wing – it’s now an intelligence wing. And it has two major missions underneath that. One is “distributed operations” – they help the Air Force analyze data that comes in from various sources and ensure that the intelligence is fed back to the decision makers. The other mission is an augmentation unit for the air operations centers. So they actually augment a complete Air Force operations center by training people in this area that, in a time of need, would actually move to that area to augment.

How has that structural change affected the region and industry?

I’m not certain yet that it’s had any significant impact. As you well know, Cape Cod doesn’t have a lot of inherent industry itself. It probably had a bigger impact on the folks that were living there and maybe on the sort-of year-round economy. The tourist trade down there is more affected by the national economy than whether the base is there or not. But what the base did was it provided some stability, some year-round stability to the economy so that in lean times you could always count on the folks being there. So the organization is smaller, and hence it will have some impact.

A.J. Bauer may be reached at ajbauer@ledger.com.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.